Estrangement Therapy for Adult Children: Support for Rebuilding Life Outside a Difficult Family

If you've gone low-contact or no-contact with a parent — or you're standing at that decision right now, exhausted by the back-and-forth — you already know how lonely this can feel. Estrangement doesn't come with casseroles or sympathy cards. Most people around you won't fully understand why you had to step back, and some may quietly (or not so quietly) think you should just get over it, forgive, or "try harder."

I work specifically with adults navigating estrangement from parents or other family members — whatever led you here, and wherever you currently stand on the question of contact. That includes estrangement rooted in:

  • Narcissistic or emotionally abusive parenting

  • Addiction in the family

  • Religious or cultural rigidity and control

  • Neglect or abandonment

Underneath most of these is something else I specialize in: the loss of knowing who you actually are once you're no longer organizing your life around a parent's approval, moods, or expectations. That identity disruption — the "who am I without them" question — is often the real work, regardless of what caused the estrangement in the first place.

This isn't a side interest for me. It's the work I focus on, because I understand it both clinically and personally.

What we might work on together:

  • Making sense of a decision to go low-contact or no-contact — without judgment on where you land

  • Grieving a relationship (or a fantasy of one) that never got to exist

  • Untangling guilt, duty, and obligation from what you actually want

  • Rebuilding a sense of identity that isn't organized around a parent's approval or disapproval

  • Making meaning out of a family story that didn't give you one you could live inside

  • Navigating holidays, family events, and other people's questions about "what happened"

  • Deciding how — or whether — to engage with extended family still in contact with the estranged parent

  • Processing ambivalence — it's normal to miss someone and still know contact isn't safe right now

How I work:

I don't come into this work with an agenda about whether you should reconcile or stay estranged. That's your call, and it can change over time. Depending on what you need, our work might focus on understanding old patterns you're still carrying, processing what happened in your body and nervous system, or working through the bigger existential questions this kind of loss brings up — who you are, what you value, and what kind of life you want to build now that you're not defined by that relationship.

For anyone curious about the clinical side: I draw on Internal Family Systems (IFS), attachment-based and EFT frameworks, CPTSD-informed trauma treatment, and Meaning-Based/existential therapy, and I move between them based on what a session calls for.

I also work from lived experience with estrangement, not just clinical training. I won't make our sessions about my story — but it means when you say something like "I still feel guilty even though I know I made the right call," you won't have to ever explain that feeling to me.

Ready to talk?

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